Residential micro-consumption characterization based on the user perspective in a citizen science initiative: the #50lWaterChallenge experience

A good characterization of water demands is essential to correctly simulate the water flow and quality in supply systems, especially in the terminal pipelines. At present, there are two types of stochastic demand models, which need as input either water flow series at monitored households or specialized technical surveys. The aim of this work is to gather guiding information that can be used to set up end-use based models thanks to the perception of self-consumption of the users involved in a citizen science experience. It consists of a simple on-line survey in the context of the #50lWaterChallenge in social networks, which collects individual micro-consumption information at households. Data is filtered in two stages and results present a good correspondence with available references in the scientific literature. Moreover, they seem to capture the particularities of confinement due to the COVID-19 outbreak in Spain. Therefore, they prove that such initiatives may be an agile and useful tool to characterize (or at least approximate) urban water demand.